1. Field of the Invention
This invention has to do with apparatus for the production of a plurality of individual bags rolled up to form a package of bags on a roll. The individual bags are wound up with the leading edges of trailing bags overlapping the trailing edges of leading bags as the bags are fed into the windup apparatus forming the roll.
More specifically a windup apparatus is provided wherein a well known turret style winder is used to make rolls of bags, or other elements in a broad sense. A turret style winder is commonly used in winding up a web of bags which are perforated between the bags but connected on the final roll. The bag segments are held together at the perforations in the roll of bags and provide an easily separable juncture between longitudinally adjacent bags. The consumer tears bags off the roll at the perforations as a bag is needed. The only time the perforation is used to separate adjacent bags by the equipment is when a predetermined number of bags--for instance twenty-five bags constituting a roll of bags--has been wound up by the winder. Upon reaching a count of twenty-five bags the well known equipment will sever the perforation between the twenty-fifth and the subsequent bag. A new roll of bags will be started onto a core, or a coreless winding shaft when coreless rolls of bags are wound, which has been sequenced into position on the turret winder.
Most usually, rolls of plastic bags are wound into a coreless roll although sometimes bags on cores are desired. The type of bag most typically found on a coreless roll are bags known as trash or garbage bags. These bags are folded lengthwise to make a narrow compact segment about thirty inches long and six to eight inches wide. When the bags are unfolded they may be within the range of twenty-four to thirty-two inches wide. These dimensions are only one example of possible bag sizes. Obviously garbage bags can be of a whole range of sizes. Consider, for example, bags to wrap deployed Christmas trees, bags to line so called fifty-five gallon drums, sandwich size bags and other longitudinally and transversely folded and unfolded bags.
Additionally, other items can be wound up on turret rollers of the type discussed herein. For instance elongated or longitudinally folded banners, signs, bumper stickers, precut tape segments, tubes of plastic or other material, woven products such as precut bandages, etc. The list of items that can be rolled up and dispensed from a roll is long. If these items have to be connected together, end-to-end, as it were, there are limits to the list of items that can be wound into a roll. For instance if bumper stickers are held together by a perforation a somewhat undesirable ragged end/edge could result when they are pulled apart by the consumer. So also with precut tape segments and bandages. And, of course, so also with longitudinally folded bags. But if the segments are simply wound up as discrete elements then as they are unwound for use there is no degradation of the segments as they are pulled off the roll.